Dirty Work

by Larry Brown

  I knew I’d just have to lie there until the shit wore off, whatever it was. It wasn’t a bad drug. It was sort of nicely numbing. I looked at the guy again. He had his head turned, watching me. He had a very gentle gaze. Not hostile at all. I asked him reckon what kind of shit they had shot me with and he said probably cat tranquilizer. I thought about it for a second, then told him I bet it would really make your old pussy purr. He got to grinning, and then I got to grinning, too. I felt kind of loopy and loose. But I also wondered how he could be in such good spirits. Finally he said he was just kidding me, but they had given me something to cool me out, no shit. I didn’t know what he was talking about and he said I’d been a bad boy and didn’t want to go along with the program.

  I laid there a minute and wondered what I’d done. I didn’t know if I wanted to find out or not. So I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask that, anyway. I asked a real beauty. Asked him how long he’d been like that.

  He said twenty-two years.

  I closed my eyes. I tried not to concentrate on him. I tried to concentrate on myself, on my situation, and I tried to remember all the things all the doctors had said. What if the scar tissue in my head did cause seizures? How did they know I couldn’t live with it for the rest of my life? Haven’t people beat cancer? Survived massive heart attacks, and lived through terrible plane crashes? Sure they have. And they’ll do it again, too. Just because you get a death sentence, it doesn’t mean you have to die. It all depends on the individual person. Everybody’s not made alike. Some people can live through what others can’t.

  I was scared. You wake up in a place like this, a place you’ve been trying to avoid for years, and you don’t know what’s happened, or why you’re there … it’s frightening. And alone. That’s the main thing. Alone.

  Finally I opened my eyes and looked at him. I told him my name was Walter and that I was from Mississippi. He shook his head and grinned, said his name was Braiden Chaney and that he was from Clarksdale. Said he’d chopped a lot of cotton down at Clarksdale. And he apologized for not being able to shake hands with me.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. So I just looked at what was left of him. I couldn’t quit looking at those four black nubs. His head was peeled slick as an egg. He was kind of like a large baby laid up there on a sheet. But he wasn’t a baby. He was about forty-something years old.

  I knew I shouldn’t get started talking to him. I didn’t want to get started talking to anybody. All I wanted was to get back home, away from here. Which here I knew by then was a VA hospital somewhere in the South, probably.

  But I knew I had to talk to him. There wasn’t any way to keep from it. I told him I lived at London Hill, and that we used to raise cotton on our place a long time ago. Told him I was an old cottonpicking cottonchopper myself, but that not too many people were growing it now.

  He nodded and agreed with me. Said everybody he knew was growing that green stuff now. Said that old shit. Said man there was more money in that old shit than a man could shake a stick at. He said he had some friends, and then his eyes went to moving around in his head. He lowered his voice and said he’d give me something but that we had to wait for dark.

  I didn’t know if he was serious or not. I asked him did he mean wacky tobaccy. Left-handed cigarettes. Boo-shit-tea.

  That will make you slap your pappy down, he said. He was grinning like a fiend by then. But it looked like he only had about six or seven teeth scattered around in his mouth. From somebody else having to brush his teeth for him, I figured.

  We didn’t talk for a while after that. I knew one thing would lead to another. It always does. I wondered what could have eaten him up like that, but I knew. A machine gun, or a mine. Or hell, maybe a claymore. Maybe even one of our own claymores. They loved to slip up on sleeping lookouts and take some white paint and paint the side that said FRONT TOWARD ENEMY white and turn it around and wake the lookouts up, so they’d pull the string and shoot themselves in the face with about three pounds of buckshot.

  But I didn’t want to talk about that. Or rockets, or machine guns, or fragmentation grenades, or exploding beer cans. Those were the last things in the world I wanted to talk about. I just stayed there and didn’t say anything for a while. But he never stopped watching me.

  My man didn’t want to talk, I understood that. It was cool. Inside he was probably shaking like a cat shitting peach pits. Hell, come in here, wake up like a duck in a different world quacking. Don’t know nobody. I don’t think he even knowed his face was all clawed up. Somebody with some fingernails had laid into him. What it looked like. And they had probably give him so much dope since he was so big his mind wasn’t right yet. So I knew to lay back, just have patience.

  Old patience hard after this long, though. Old patience done flew out the window after this long. Lay in here and lay in here and lay in here. Have to watch all that pussy on TV. Miss America. “Days Of Our Lives.”

  Oh Lance, won’t you please come over here and sniff of my magnificent breasts?

  Oh Lance, I believe you is bringing me to the brink of a tremendous organism. Yes. Oh, Lance, dolling, oh, oh, oh no don’t put the root to me!

  Get you some this here love bone.

  Wait a minute now, Lance!

  You know you been asking for it.

  Lance, you get that thing away from me now, that’s a weapon. Let’s talk this thing over.

  Shoot. Don’t need that. Takes too long just thinking about it. I need to invent me something like a radio show. Go on broadcast every night. Be on FM and be a voice in the little blue lights. Be nice to do something for kids. Have some late show they could stay up and listen to. Have pajamas on and stuff. Cowboy hats. I’da loved to had me some kids. Little old naked babies you could wash in the tub and stuff. Make you so happy you wouldn’t know what to do. Little black asses running around all over the house. Wonder if the Lord made the black man at midnight. We know You love us. We love You, too. I mean, six, seven thousand years from now … won’t make no difference, will it? Everybody gonna be so mixed up by then that far in the future that they all gonna be the same color by then, ain’t they? Whyn’t You set me down here five or six thousand years later? They won’t even have no damn guns by then probably. And I could move on me some one-sixteenth Polynesian milkmaid from Hamburg with a uncle in New York whose brother was a Jewish guy. Naw, I know, can’t do it. Got to keep us all separated. But how come they ain’t a word in black language for them bad as they word in white language for us? Why didn’t we think us up a bunch of good words instead of picking all their damn cotton? We wasted about two hundred years picking fucking cotton.

  I know. I’m a sinner. I have lustuous thoughts every day. Cause they show it on TV. Bob Barker’s got them girls on the tube all the time. Who is that … that Janet Pennerton? Naw, that other one. That poody woody one. She is so fine. One of em done had a baby now she don’t look as fine. What’d I do with that National Enquirer that had that picture of her in it? I never did finish reading that story about that little space-boy come in them people’s window had them two little space-puppydogs with helmets on sticking out his butthole anyway. Hell they done got it over there. All the way across the room. I guess the damn nurses been reading it. Well shit. Muse yo self. Spect yo self. Wawa wawa wa.

  All right, motherfucker, where’s the damn Percy Sledge album? Getting tired of this shit. Y’all gonna give away two million dollars or you gonna show the damn movie? Why hell I done seen that one three times. That’s the guy that gets all them kids in that boat and then rows em all the way across the Pacific Ocean with two stale crackers to eat the whole way over there. I don’t want to see that shit no more. That’s bad as that one the other night where this guy had this rare disease, one of them rare disease movies. Why don’t y’all put something good on? Have to watch some old fat-ass white lady trying to win her a car or something. Trip to Mexico. Won’t put on nobody good like Humphrey Bogart rolling them little steel balls around in his hand. Old Humphre
y could get the damn women. Had them women crawling all over him. He was so swab and debonair with them women. I liked the one where he was pulling old Katherine Hepburn around in that boat and got them leeches on him and got the heebie-jeebies every time she pulled one off. They don’t make movies like that no more. If you dumbass Casual Company rejects over there had any culture you’d turn it over there on some National Geographic stuff or something educational. Naw I’m a trump I’m a spade naw you broke the widder what is all that shit about anyway. Play poker like y’all some hot-shit gamblers till it drives me up the wall and bet damn nickels. Bring it over here sometime if you want to gamble. I maybe can’t deal but by God I can play if somebody’d hold the cards for me. I got the money. Naw. Y’all can’t communicate with me. Y’all ain’t stuck in here. Y’all just got to come in here in the daytime and make a bunch of noise and fuck up my movie watching. Y’all done just smoked too much dope or wrecked your car cause of some dope dependency from some dope habit you picked up overseas and ain’t never come down yet. Ain’t never smoked no dope cause you had to. You just don’t know what it is. Fear. Help you get you some heightened awareness. You know your ass can be blowed off any second, you choose the heightened perception. When that trip wire’s like a hair, and you on your knees, and everybody behind you trying to be silent and black and invisible, and they don’t take a step till you say that next six inches is clear.…

  You boys don’t know what it was like. Y’all didn’t grow up with the threat of a war hanging over your head. They was drafting then. Couldn’t just worry about pussy. Had to worry about going to war and getting your ass shot off. Especially if your ass was black as mine. Yeah. Aw yeah, y’all went out and trained, I know. But you ain’t got that threat over you. My mama, Lord, she cried, just took on something awful. Wasn’t never gonna see her baby again. Got down on her knees and begged You not to take me. Couldn’t stand to see me go. Closer to time it got, more she cried. Every night.

  What’d she think, reckon? You’s gonna step down between me and the U.S. Government? She prayed enough for it, didn’t she? Never saw a woman so heartsick. Looked good then, didn’t I, Lord? Two hundred and nineteen pounds of blood and bone and muscle. That old woman raised me on peas and biscuits. Go home that’s what she’d feed me. Tell me to eat. Last time I left I know I was laying in there in my bed and I woke up just before it was daylight. Light was on in the kitchen, and I could smell her cooking biscuits. Wasn’t nothing but a little old shack. I was gonna build her something better later. I woke up, just wide awake. I was leaving that day. Boarding a plane at Memphis, going for orientation and weapons fire before we jumped off. What we called jumping off. Jumping off the world. I had all that in head of me and I woke up in my mama’s house with her cooking biscuits for me. Smelled the same way every morning. Always smelled the same. She never woke me. Didn’t have to. Biscuits woke me. I heard her tell people, That child can smell them biscuits in his sleep and when he smells em he wakes up. My mama was so good to me.

  I laid in there that morning. Had my uniform hanging up in there. Soldier of the most powerful nation in the world. And all I could think was Why, you know, why? I didn’t even understand the whole thing. Just went cause it was my duty. I’m sure there was plenty who went didn’t understand the whole thing. Just went cause it was their duty. This my country, I’m gonna fight for my country. Sentiment was strong for God and Country, young boys, listen up. Everybody’s daddy had been in World War II. Some daddies, anyway. Now they telling us we won’t never be in another one like that one again. That one taught us a lesson. We ain’t having no more futile wars. Till we have one in the Middle East. Or down in Nicaragua.

  Ain’t no need in having a war lessen they just bomb the hell out of you like Pearl Harbor or something. Then all you can do is just bomb the shit out of them right back, and fight, and get a whole bunch of people killed and finally not accomplish a goddamn thing except get your economy ruined forty years later.

  Everything just pisses me off. The world gets worse all the time. Had one man one time that would have stopped it. Of course they had to kill him. And then things just went to shit. I don’t know what they want to watch this crap like “The Love Connection” for. If all these people so attractive and not married why ain’t they out legging down off TV? They seem like they had a good time, though. I guess I sort of like “The Love Connection.” I like old Chuck Woodery. But half the time these motherfuckers’ll let you get halfway through a program and then switch channels. Fraid they might miss something else. That morning I woke up in my mama’s house was the last morning I was whole, and with her. I’d shined my shoes the night before. Me and her had watched some old movie on TV. I’d brought us home a sixpack of Miller. Loved her a cold beer, now. She drank two and I drank three. It was old Jimmy Stewart in something. He was in the Civil War. And he got shot, and he had this beautiful horse, and his arm was almost blowed off, and this doctor said he couldn’t save his arm but saw that horse he was riding and remarked over what a fine animal it was. This guy was like a low-down motherfucker on the battlefield of life. Couldn’t save his arm, see, just couldn’t save it. Then he seen old Silver over there. And old Jimmy Stewart told him, Doc, if you’ll save my leg, arm, whatever it was, you can have that horse. Well the old Doc decided he might could save it then. What I’d love to seen after he got through fixing old Jimmy Stewart’s arm was about four corporals come in there and get him and march him out to a wall and shoot the sumbitch full of holes. But old Jimmy never did write home again and his mama thought he was dead and finally President Lincoln got him in his office and told him he’d better write his mama if he knew what was good for him. Bunch of years later they (after they got happily reunited) found his old horse pulling a coal wagon in Kansas City or somewhere and bought him back for like five bucks. They was gonna keep him in a warm barn and all for the rest of his life. It was a real heartwarming story. It was a happily ever after.

  What you got to do is stay up late at night and check your TV Guide for this good stuff. You’ll maybe see it once in the next fifty years. I done seen it. Just can’t remember the name of it.

  But me and Mama had a good time that night, watching that movie. We was cooking us some popcorn in between times. She’d run in there and turn the burner on and run back in and set down and I’d run in there and put the popcorn on and she’d run in there and shake it and run back and then I’d run in there and shake it and that way didn’t neither of us miss much. And we had butter. REAL butter. Not this fake shit now. My mama still had a churn between her legs every morning.

  But it come time to go. That morning it did. She fixed me some coffee, I was smoking for the first time in front of her. She didn’t see me leave from Memphis. She just saw me leave from Clarksdale. Cotton was up. Most of them around us had a pretty good stand. Looked like they’s gonna make it good that year. I felt better, finally, looking at it, knowing I wasn’t going to have to chop no more of the shit. My little sister was standing out there with us. Old boys I knew from Tunica was taking me to Memphis. They was all out there in the car waiting. One of them times, you know. I didn’t have to report until the next morning. We was going to Beale Street that night. But there my mama and them having to tell me goodbye. And what a thing for her, me having to go off to something like that. Ain’t no words to say, except the ones everybody thinking about but just don’t want to say. Don’t die.

  What you gonna tell em? You can’t do nothing but kiss em and hope they right.

  I wish they’d put that other movie back on, that one I seen that time. One where that guy had all his arms and legs blowed off and his face too. That guy talked to Jesus a couple of times. I don’t think Jesus ever come and set on his bed like He does mine, though.

  I was thinking about Thomas Gandy. He was a little kid who lived right down the road from us when I was a little kid. It was right after they sent my daddy to the pen.

  You ever tried to remember the earliest thing you could rem
ember? I mean when you were little and what you were doing? I have. For a long time the earliest thing I could remember was riding on a wagonload of cotton with some little black kids and jumping around in it. But I got hypnotized one day by this girl who was going to school over at Ole Miss and after I came to I got to remembering some stuff that was even earlier than that. It was a long time ago. I saw a man get killed. Well, I didn’t really see it. I just saw him after he got killed.

  Nobody’s ever talked about it to me. Not even my mother. Some things people just don’t talk about.

  In my mind I put myself about four. Maybe I was five. I don’t know. I know Max wasn’t born yet.

  The thing I remember most is the man lying there in a big pool of blood. It was black. Like he was stuck in the middle of a great big scab that was growing on the ground. I remember us on the porch, just sitting there, looking at him. I know I kept asking Mama something, over and over. I guess it was because I couldn’t figure out why that man was just lying in our front yard, not moving.

  My daddy killed him over something about my mother, but I don’t know what it was. I don’t know if this guy was trying to go with her or what.

  I think I heard the shot. I don’t know where I was. That’s what’s aggravating about it. Maybe if I’d seen it, I might have been able to understand what it was all about. But I didn’t. It’s like I just appeared on the porch and saw him lying there. A dog came up and smelled him. I remember that. Then the dog jerked backward and went away.

  I know they came and got my daddy that day. They must have. I mean you can’t just kill somebody and then hang around the house. When you do something like that, you’ve got to pay for it. I know. I’ve had to pay for a lot of things myself.

  After they hauled my daddy off to the pen, that left me and Mama to fend for ourselves, as they say. We had to get our cotton patch through the summer without the weeds taking it and then get it picked in the fall. I don’t know how she did it. But I do know how she did it. She got out there with a hoe and worked, all day, every day. Maybe I was five. I can’t think. My head’s still messed up. Five or six. I helped her. Wait a minute. Max is six years younger than me. Maybe she was pregnant when they took him. I bet that’s what it was. Hell. Maybe he freshened her loins the night before he shot that asshole, whoever he was. He must have been an asshole. He must have done something really shitty for my daddy to have to shoot him and go to the pen.